Three Ways to Translate Your Thoughts on a Social Network

Machine translation is getting very popular on social networks. It seems that language barrier is not an obstacle at all for all those who think their list of friends is not long enough. Some just add friends no matter where they are from or what language they speak and try to find a way to make the words just flow to the others – they install machine translation applications. The solution may come in the form of a translated wall, a translated text or a translated chat – these are the main types of language translators on networks.

The question that usually arises is how to choose the best application for our needs. To answer this question first of all we must know what exactly our need is and for what purpose the translator is to be used. Chat maniacs would install a translated chat straight away, the fans of long messages would and those who like to browse profiles and leave wall comments would install a translated wall.

All these are used for different purposes but the principle is one and the same for all of these major machine translator types – first a source language should be used and then a target language, and then push a "translate" or "send" button and yet all of them have advantages and disadvantages depending on the personal needs.

Chat translators are applications for chat which both users must have in order to be able to speak to each other. The disadvantage is that they must spare the slang words, idioms, sayings and must use correct sentence structure in order to get a good output in the other language. The good thing is that there is no need to open a web translator in another window and copy and paste all the messages you write and receive because the translation is in real time right before the eyes of users.

Translated walls look like other social network walls but have the function to translate the messages which are posted on it. One may make a post in their mother tongue and let the wall owner have it translated after or choose from the list of target languages. The disadvantage of this wall is that messages can not be deleted if they contain abusive language but they can be hidden and remain visible only for the owner of the wall.

Text translators are the best solution for those who do not spend their time talking about the weather with others on-line. These applications translate text which can be later copied and pasted anywhere in the profile or the web. The advantage is that most of the text translators support many languages ​​but have a limit for the symbols of the input text and a limited number of translations. The quality of translation of all translators is more or less the same but some support more extras or more languages ​​and then influence the decision of the user.

In order to make their products better translation software developers work on rare languages ​​like Urdu and Tagalog so that their services can be available for a greater number of people worldwide. The thing is that the world is not a very big place and communication has gone several levels up – time and space are not what they used to be and machine translation is reaching new heights. Since its dawn about sixty years ago this field of technology has constantly been worked on and social network translators are just one loop in the chain.